Foreign Affairs
Related: About this forumSyrian army 'cuts off last supply route to east Aleppo'
The Syrian army says that pro-government forces have cut off all supply routes into the eastern, rebel-held part of Aleppo in the country's north.
According to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, eastern Aleppo has been under effective siege since July 11, and advances in recent days by forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad have strengthened their control of the only route in.
"Today there is no way at all to bring anything into Aleppo," Observatory Director Rami Abdel Rahman said on Wednesday.
Once Syria's largest city, Aleppo has been roughly divided between government control in the west and rebel control in the east since mid-2012.
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/07/syrian-army-cuts-supply-route-east-aleppo-160727133458560.html
bemildred
(90,061 posts)WASHINGTON U.S.-backed Syrian fighters who have cleared parts of the strategic northern city of Manbij have found a vast collection of intelligence on the Islamic State group, the Pentagon said Wednesday.
The United States and its coalition partners are sifting through approximately 10,000 items of intelligence, including computer data files, thumb drives and Islamic State-group rewritten textbooks, said Col. Chris Garver, the Baghdad-based spokesman for Operation Inherent Resolve.
The coalition-backed Syrian fighters have retaken about half of Manbij from the Islamic State group, Garver told reporters at the Pentagon.
The files are providing a clearer understanding of how the Islamic State group used Manbij to process incoming foreign fighters for Iraq and Syria and how it also hosted external attack operations there to send trained terrorists out into the world, Garver said.
http://www.stripes.com/news/pentagon-10-000-items-of-islamic-state-intel-collected-from-manbij-1.421212
bemildred
(90,061 posts)The results of the next Offset Strategy are beginning to appear on the worlds battlefields. Unfortunately, it is not the U.S. military that is deploying these capabilities. Instead it is our competitors and adversaries that are exploiting the revolution in unmanned aerial systems or drones to great effect. After action reports out of eastern Ukraine document how the Russian military and their proxy fighters have employed drones to locate concentrations of opposing Ukrainian forces and, in particular, their headquarters and then provide precision target locations for massed indirect fires. Iran has been sending drones, some allegedly based on U.S. systems that fell into Teherans hands, across Syria and over Israels northern territories. Even more ominous, Islamic terrorist groups such as ISIS, Hezbollah and Hamas are beginning to deploy drones in quantities. The U.S. and its Coalition allies no longer have sole use of the air domain. Drones provide our adversaries with the ability to conduct aerial ISR, mission command, targeting and even precision strike -- all capabilities that were, until recently, solely the province of wealthy militaries.
What is remarkable is the speed with which ISIS and other terrorists have taken to drones and the sheer numbers that are appearing in the skies of the Middle East. Not a week goes by now without a report of U.S. or Coalition forces downing a drone. Most of these are really simple, cheap, hobby shop models, used to keep tabs on our forces and provide targeting information for indirect fire systems. But that is all that is needed to provide ISIS with an order-of-magnitude or greater improvement in ISR, targeting and command and control. Because they are cheap and easy to deploy and operate, even the poorest terrorist group will be able to deploy drones in the hundreds.
The most significant part of the ISIS-driven revolution is not the use of drones as flying improvised explosive devices (IEDs), although they have experimented with this. The dramatic development in the use of drones is the marriage of these aerial vehicles with capabilities provided by companies such as GoPro to achieve real time battlefield command and control. You can go online and see videos of ISIS operations such as vehicle-borne IED attacks, filmed by a drones camera for propaganda purposes. It is no big leap for ISIS commanders to use these same video feeds in real time to select targets, coordinate forces and mass their fighters and improvised explosive systems at the most advantageous places.
Mind you, the U.S. has a similar capability consisting of dozens of manned airborne sensors and command and control aircraft, drones carrying advanced sensors such as Gorgon Stare that can watch dozens of targets simultaneously, and ground based operations centers filled with computers and flat screen displays. However, the U.S. capability requires thousands of people and costs many billions of dollars.
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/drone-wars-defeating-the-unmanned-threat-will-require-17144
bemildred
(90,061 posts)Hundreds of terrorists will fan out to infiltrate western Europe and the U.S. to carry out attacks on a wider scale as Islamic State is defeated in Syria, FBI Director James Comey warned.
"At some point there's going to be a terrorist diaspora out of Syria like we've never seen before," Comey said Wednesday in New York. "We saw the future of this threat in Brussels and Paris," said the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, adding that future attacks will be on "an order of magnitude greater."
Comey's blunt warnings echo those of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who has scoffed at Obama administration efforts to defeat Islamic State extremists in Syria and Iraq. Nonetheless, the FBI chief's comments reflect a consensus among U.S. intelligence officials that the group inevitably will strike out abroad as it continues to lose ground militarily under attack from a U.S.-led coalition.
CIA Director John Brennan told the Senate Intelligence Committee in June that "our efforts have not reduced the group's terrorism capability and global reach." Using an acronym for Islamic State, Brennan said, "as the pressure mounts on ISIL, we judge that it will intensify its global terror campaign to maintain its dominance of the global terrorism agenda."
http://www.stripes.com/news/us/fbi-chief-warns-terrorist-diaspora-will-come-to-the-west-1.421192
bemildred
(90,061 posts)Syrian government forces and their allies seized territory from rebels outside Damascus, encroaching on a pocket of insurgent-held land east of the capital, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and state media reported on Wednesday.
The advance took place overnight near the town of Hosh al-Fara area in the Eastern Ghouta suburb, the British-based monitoring group said.
Quoting a military source, Syrian state news agency SANA said government and allied forces took control of a farming area south-east of Hosh al-Fara during the day on Wednesday.
Fighting around the capital has intensified according to the Observatory, and government forces have stepped up their bombardment of rebel-held areas. A rare bout of rebel mortar fire on government-controlled central Damascus on Sunday killed several people.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-mideast-crisis-syria-damascus-idUKKCN107278?rpc=401
yourpaljoey
(2,166 posts)Sounds like we need to get out and let Russia and Syria handle things.
bemildred
(90,061 posts)But you can tell the facts on the ground are changing in Syria in the government's favor. Comey for one says so, and I am sure he is not a fan of that development. But lots of other people are saying that too.
Kerry & Lavrov continue to work on getting the war ended before Assad wins it all, and we elsewhere continiue to object heatedly to that. Putin appears to be dragging Assad to the negotiating table, while continuing to support his military efforts from the air.
And the US election contest splatters all about to worsen the confusion.
The fundamental questions remain as we discussed before, but I expect little clarity until the Putin-Erdogan meeting in a couple weeks, they have some serious issues to iron out, and say they intend to, but will they? And what would that look like?
Erdogan does have a weak position, he's not going to bully Putin, but he does have some fancy cards to play too.
The Kurds do seem to be central to any resolution, what happens to them? Will Putin throw them under the bus or make Erdogan and Assad learn to get along with them? Hmm.
yourpaljoey
(2,166 posts)High ho the dairy o, the Kurds stand alone
bemildred
(90,061 posts)And so do we, they are our buddies too. They have been very effective against the jihadis. Their position seems far from hopeless, but they ought not be too trusting of anybody either.
Putin wants Syria unified, and will try to make Assad cut a deal with the Syrian kurds, I believe, which seems possible, but what happens to the Kurds in Iraq, Iran, & Turkey? I don't expect the fighters in Syria will stay out of it if there is a war against their fellow Kurds elsewhere once Syria winds down. In Iraq that doesn't seem much of a problem at the moment, and Iran, but in Turkey it will be.
Erodgan has left the Kurds out of his unity celebrations, so far, and he already has a budding civil war going in the SE.
And Putin will insist he stop supporting the jihadis in the Caucasus and elsewhere.
yourpaljoey
(2,166 posts)It's crunch time.
What will Putin do?
bemildred
(90,061 posts)By John Helmer, Moscow
On August 9, in St. Petersburg, Russias President Vladimir Putin will meet Turkeys President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The moment is revolutionary. There has not been a comparable political turning-point in the 67 years since the establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); not in the century since the Ottoman Empire sided with Germany against Russia in World War I; nor in the two centuries since Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II and the Russian Tsar Alexander I aligned against Napoleon and the British.
Russian sources say they are sure the Russian secret services did not warn Erdogan or help his forces prevail in the July 15-16 coup against him. After Erdogan began his counter-coup, and in the fight still continuing between Erdogans Islamic forces and the regular Turkish military, the sources add, there has been, and there will be, Russian help. It is more for the future, they explain, than for last weeks outcome that Turkish deputy prime minister Mehmet Şimşek told his counterpart Arkady Dvorkovich in Moscow on Tuesday: I would like to thank you for support regarding recent events in Turkey, for supporting democracy and the Turkish government.
The Russian sources say it is already agreed the two sides will pay a soon-to-be settled price in two-way trade; gas, nuclear and other energy projects; plus tourism. Much more is at stake, though, one of the sources adds. Putin and his advisors believe Erdogan is still in danger. They support him now for the opportunity to reorganize the relationship with Turkey. They mean to secure Russia from encirclement on the southern frontier and the Black Sea, dismemberment of the Caucasus, and attack on the Kremlin by its enemies. Right now, as Europe collapses, the enemy is the US with NATO in support. If Turkey breaks with the US, NATO is a paraplegic. We shall see how Putin and Erdogan choose to portray the new Rome*, the new Byzantium* next Tuesday.
http://johnhelmer.net/?p=16140
Turkish-Russian Rapprochement Turbocharged by Istanbul Coup Attemp
The recent failed military coup in Istanbul is pushing the Turkish government to prioritize a rapprochement with Russia, as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is due to meet his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg on August 9.
The meeting comes at an opportune time for Putin. Turkey is a key geopolitical player in the Black Sea region. But its Western orientation is now coming under stress. Ankaras ties with nearly all of its western allies are now strained amid suspicions of complicity in the unsuccessful July 15 putsch and growing criticism by both the United States and European Union over Erdoğans escalating crackdown in the coup-attempt aftermath.
Ever the opportunist, Putin seems content to set aside Turkish-Russian rancor. Relations between Ankara and Moscow were plunged into the deep freeze following Turkeys downing of a Russian bomber operating from a Syrian airbase in November.
Even before the Istanbul coup attempt, relations had begun to thaw following Erdoğans apology in June, but that process now seems set to accelerate. There is a mutual understanding these deteriorated relations do not benefit both countries, said Ayşe Sözen Usluer, a foreign policy aide to Erdoğan. I can see a political will to normalize these relations; I guess these relations will be back to what they were before the plane was shot down.
http://www.eurasianet.org/node/79876